Before he published the Prince, Machiavelli published the seducer. Before he published a masterpiece of political philosophy, he published a comedy.The Mandragola (The Mandrake) tells the story of Callimaco, a handsome young man and seducer of women. He hears about the Florentine beauty Lucrezia and begins a conspiracy to seduce her. The problem is, she’s married. She’s married to a wealthy old man who can’t get her pregnant and they need a son to maintain their political position.Callimaco shows up, disguised as a doctor, and convinces her husband to give her a mandrake potion to increase her fertility. The problem is, Callimaco tells the old man, the first man who sleeps with her after she takes the potion will die. They decide to find an unwitting dupe to have sex with her. Callimaco, in different disguise, becomes the dupe, much to his delight. And Lucrezia’s. She at first was hesitant, but she relented and, convinced it was divine providence, takes Callimaco as her lover indefinitely.Everything turns out well. The old man get his male heir and Callimaco gets Lucrezia.Show notes here

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An Analysis of Eric Voegelin’s 4th and 5th Gnostic TraitsShow notes here

The Gnostic Believes His Paradise is an Historic Inevitability and His Movement Will Bring It About

Did you take a sociology class in high school or college?Did you know sociology’s founder, August Comte (1798-1857), was kind of a dick? The Encyclopedia Britannica says he was “ungrateful,” “self-centered,” and “egocentric.” If those aren’t bad enough, other biographers say he was a megalomaniac, cruel, and downright nuts.Comte, on the other hand, considered himself a relevant man, to put it modestly. He was born at the end of the Enlightenment and fully embraced its ideals,[1]which Isaiah Berlin summarized as:1.            Every genuine question can be answered. If it can’t be answered, it’s not a genuine question.2.            The answers to the questions can be discovered, learned, and taught.3.            All the answers are compatible with one another.Those ideals are captured perfectly by science. Science is the discipline of power: it answers questions and puts them into neat boxes. Physics is especially good at this.Comte concluded that the principles of physics could be applied to society: “social physics” is what he initially called it before calling it “sociology.”Show notes here

The Gnostic is a Believer

This is a podcast episode from “Outside the Modern Limits,” a newsletter geared to help people understand and thrive in modernity. You can subscribe and find the show notes here. 

Why We Judge. And Why We Need to Stop

“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” RousseauRousseau’s passage from the beginning of The Social Contract contends for the most famous in philosophy.Rousseau’s point was simple: Humans are good, but there’s a lot of suffering, so social institutions must be corrupting everything.Significantly, Rousseau didn’t see any problems with himself. He was arguably the most self-centered philosopher of all time. He was so self-centered, biographers wonder if he was even capable of love.Show notes here.For notes regarding the first trait, click here.

The Gnostic Never Blames Himself

A Diagnostic of the GnosticEric Voegelin was to modern gnosticism what Knute Rockne was to Notre Dame football. Rockne didn’t start the ND football program and Voegelin didn’t discover modern gnosticism, but they took their subjects to much higher levels.The Swiss theologian, Hans urs Von Balthasar was supposedly the first person to draw parallels between the ancient gnostic heresy and modern theories in Prometheus (1937), which examined modern German thought. Albert Camus did a similar thing with modern French thought in The Rebel (1951).[1]But Voegelin took the strain of thought much further in The New Science of Politics (1952). The book became a Time cover story and, voila, gnosticism was in the limelight, a least among nerds.Granted, later in life, Voegelin said he wasn’t sure “gnosticism” was the best term to use and thought perhaps it received too much attention, but he didn’t remotely conclude that the term didn’t work. Far from it. Later in life, at age 67, he published his most popular work, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (1968).Show Note Here

We're All Machiavellians Now

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